le or death. Yet the very urgency of this
challenge to think seems to paralyse the critical intelligence of very
many people altogether. They will say, "This war is going to produce
enormous changes in everything." They will then subside mentally with a
feeling of having covered the whole ground in a thoroughly safe manner.
Or they will adopt an air of critical aloofness. They will say, "How
is it possible to foretell what may happen in this tremendous sea of
change?" And then, with an air of superior modesty, they will go on
doing--whatever they feel inclined to do. Many others, a degree less
simple in their methods, will take some entirely partial aspect, arrive
at some guesswork decision upon that, and then behave as though that met
every question we have to face. Or they will make a sort of admonitory
forecast that is conditional upon the good behaviour of other people.
"Unless the Trade Unions are more reasonable," they will say. Or,
"Unless the shipping interest is grappled with and controlled." Or,
"Unless England wakes up." And with that they seem to wash their hands
of further responsibility for the future.

One delightful form of put-off is the sage remark, "Let us finish the
war first, and then let us ask what is going to happen after it." One
likes to think of the beautiful blank day after the signing of the peace
when these wise minds swing round to pick up their deferred problems....

I submit that a man has not done his duty by himself as a rational
creature unless he has formed an idea of what is going on, as one
complicated process, until he has formed an idea sufficiently definite
for him to make it the basis of a further idea, which is his own
relationship to that process. He must have some notion of what the
process is going to do to him, and some notion of what he means to do,
if he can, to the process. That is to say, he must not only have an idea
how the process is going, but also an idea of how he wants it to go. It
seems so natural and necessary for a human brain to do this that it is
hard to suppose that everyone has not more or less attempted it. But
few people, in Great Britain at any rate, have the habit of frank
expression, and when people do not seem to have made out any of these
things for themselves there is a considerable element of secretiveness
and inexpressiveness to be allowed for before we decide that they have
not in some sort of fashion done so. Still, after all allowances have